Digital markets and mechanisms
Market design for software-mediated exchange: what mechanisms make markets honest when the participants, or the venues, are systems. Paused while adjacent work matures.
Markets as software
Every digital market is a mechanism embedded in software: rules for matching, pricing, clearing, and settlement, executed exactly as written. Mechanism design asks which rules produce honest behavior when participants act strategically. Software makes the question concrete — the mechanism is the code, and every property it has can be inspected, or exploited.
The interesting cases are the new ones: markets where one side is a system acting on a human's behalf, where reputation is portable, or where the venue itself is operated by a party with an interest in the outcome.
Why paused
This direction is paused, deliberately. Its questions are durable, but the lab's current research in local inference and software architecture produces more immediate leverage on what we build. We keep the notes and revisit when the adjacent work matures.
Pausing is not abandoning — it is sequencing. The registry says what is true now: not active.